15.05.1997

Where the Party mattered

Phil Watson writes on the contemporary practice of Communist Party history

The last few years has seen the production of a number of important works regarding the history of the CPGB. Indeed, one could go as far as to say that it has become a fashionable subject for left-leaning academics. Books and essays by the likes of Kevin Morgan, Nina Fishman and John Callaghan have established a critical historiography that has finally begun to marginalise the past products of bureaucratic inertia. This development is of course the outcome of the erosion and fragmentation of the ‘official’ communist movement and the political identities that sustained it.

However, there has been seemingly little attempt to address the purpose of Communist Party history, an important guarantee of its future existence and vitality. Kevin Morgan referred to a recent conference as aiming to “simply ... provide a forum for recent work in the field that is critical, disinterested and free of any narrow partisanship”. Such statements are perhaps unsurprising, in that academia in general - gripped as it is with the pessimistic inanities of post-modernity - seems unable to give any direction to its increasingly feeble and fractured output.

For most readers of the Weekly Worker the purpose of CPGB history will be quite clear, being a means by which to distil a distinctive revolutionary tradition based on the past successes and failures of the communist movement. If we stop for one moment and consider that a tradition is a set of practices elaborated on the basis of past events and then go on to contemplate that as Marxists we are concerned with rendering the processes of human development and change conscious, we can then conceive of tradition as a conservative methodology and of little use in the engagement of CPGB history. Yet it is precisely this theoretical standpoint that leading figures in the Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History have sought to elaborate, as made clear by Bornstein and Richardson in War and the International, the second volume of their history of the British Trotskyist movement:

“It seems to have been missed by practically all the Trotskyist groups that our first volume was written to hold up the past as an accusing mirror to their present policies, and we have obviously not succeeded in our aim” (War and the International: a history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain London 1986, pxi).

This is not to say that Bornstein and Richardson are necessarily blind to the problems of Trotskyist ‘orthodoxy’:

“The many Trotskyist groups of today construct their programmes as a man strings beads - adding unit to unit until some sort of accumulation has taken place - a good idea from here, a neat little slogan there, bits of borrowed practice from anywhere” (ibid p239).

What they have seemingly missed is that the fumblings of modern-day Trotskyism are only given coherence by their ability to measure and justify their contemporary practice against the ‘traditions’ they seek to emulate. Judging by the amount of Trotskyists who are approaching the onset of the 21st century with an electoral tactic elaborated by Lenin in 1920, it is reasonable to state that Bornstein and Richardson are being a little hard on themselves. The reflection in their traditionalist mirror has clearly been noted and acted upon.

In the recent Opening the books collection, Eric Hobsbawm was given space to explain why CP history is so important (‘Afterword’ in G Andrews, N Fishman and K Morgan Opening the books: essays on the social and cultural history of the British Communist Party London 1995, p2). Hobsbawm established a four-point case: the Party’s significance in the British trade union movement; its position as a conduit into Comintern organisation in the British empire; communist influence on British intellectual life; and finally, the Party’s regional weight in parts of Scotland and South Wales. It is clear that Hobsbawm’s essentially empirical argument is only really concerned with making sure that the CPGB is not left out of the historical record, not in engaging that history for future generations. Indeed, Hobsbawm seems content to drive a committed and socially engaged communist historiography out of his equation:

“There is all the difference in the world between debates about a political organisation which is there, charged with a cargo of hopes, hatreds and fears, and discussions about the past of a body which no longer has a future because it no longer has a present ... a book such as this could not have been written 20 years ago” (ibid p242).

This represents a dubious argument which appears to discount the possibility of any live political project engaging with its past. The fact that the CPGB in the past was incapable of addressing its history is not the product of some all-governing law. Rather it should be seen as an expression of the cultural demons at the heart of the Party in years gone by, alluded to by its former Welsh secretary, Bert Pearce, as “a certain inhibition of general and free controversy on some theoretical questions” (‘The national problem in Britain: a reply to some points in discussion’ Marxism Today December 1968). The expansion of a CP historiography without the commitment that formerly sustained it is a profoundly negative development. In reality, Hobsbawm’s outlook is merely a recipe to take us back to the bad old days of Klugman et al, with the production of works at pains to stress how important the Party was and very little else.

A more serious attempt to locate CP history within the methodology of Marxism has been provided by Kevin Morgan. However, from the outset it becomes immediately transparent that Morgan is intent upon tying himself in theoretical knots:

“The best Marxist historical writing is based upon a comprehension of the relationship, dialectical if you like, between ‘determinism’ and ‘voluntarism’. In broad terms the field of political struggle may be determined by the development of the forces of production and economic relationships, but that struggle is the conscious activity of human agents capable of challenging, and thereby changing, the logic of determinism ... History is the outcome of the struggle between rival classes challenging the logic of determinism in diverse ways.” (Against fascism and war: ruptures and continuities in British Communist Party politics 1934-41 Manchester 1993, p5)

Morgan’s espousal of “the best Marxist historical writing” is in fact marked by a quite false and unMarxist opposition of subject and object. The “conscious activity of human agents” is seemingly segregated onto the plane of the “political struggle” whilst a mythical ‘determinism’ accounts for the broad lines of development. Thus a fractured and partly naturalised social world becomes contemplated by an inability to see the essential unity of subject and object. As I pointed out in an earlier review of Chris Williams’ Democratic Rhondda, this is of no small concern to the history of the CPGB, in that the Party is unable to pose itself as a constituent tendency of the social and political landscape of the British working class. This is not an arbitrary demand, as Lukács pointed out in 1932:

“And no ‘tendency’ can or need be counterposed to objective reality, as a ‘demand’, for the demands that the writer represents are integral parts of the self-movement of this reality itself (‘“Tendency” or partisanship’ in C Harrison and P Woods [eds] Art in theory 1900-1990: an anthology of changing ideas London 1996, p339).

It is no accident that Lukács goes on to insist upon “a correct - dialectical - definition of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity” (ibid p399-400). This is not to suggest that Morgan’s approach is without potential. His determination to see the CPGB’s line as “made up by voices in the coal mines, the dockyards [and] in the trade union branches” is an important statement. However, surrounded as it is by a tangled web of theoretical misconceptions, there is even here the danger of lapsing backwards into a reductionist sociology. Thus in Morgan’s richly entertaining Harry Pollitt, the book’s protagonist is used as a metaphor for “a more balanced insight into the character of British communism” (K Morgan Harry Pollitt Manchester 1993, p10, my emphasis). Morgan seeks to utilise Pollitt’s membership and ultimately leadership of the CPGB to show how “he came to project the ideals of his youth into a dictatorship more brutal than anything experienced in Edwardian Britain”. In this scenario, Pollitt, the boilermaker from South Lancashire, becomes a leading player in the proletarian tragedy of a specifically British Stalinism.

What has been most valuable about Nina Fishman’s work on the rebuilding of the CPGB’s trade union base in the 1930s and the elaboration of the Party’s relationship with the South Wales miners provided by Dai Smith and Hywel Francis (see Miner against fascism London 1984 and H Francis and D Smith The Fed: a history of the South Wales miner in the 20th century London 1990) is that the CP is presented to us as an organic part of the working class activity and consciousness. This set of priorities has the dual effect of simultaneously narrowing and broadening the scope of its subject matter. Meaningful investigation into the history of the CPGB is limited to those geographical and social areas in which the Party mattered.

CP history is not an arena for esoterics. On the other hand the purpose of the Party’s history is restored, in that it becomes indivisibly bound up with the development of the British working class. Younger generations can take from this the idea of historical thinking, where societal change represents the outcome of an applied collective consciousness (whatever the authors’ particular criticisms of a political project such as the CPGB). This is in fact the exact opposite of the trawl for a set of a historical ‘traditions’ that the left can re-heat for contemporary consumption. In this sense the continued practice of Communist Party history should not be seen as a set of pointers to the future, but for the future. A subtle difference, but vital nonetheless.

For the new generation of CP historians this will no doubt represent a codified heresy, in that the necessity of such a project being brought to fruition by partisans will in their eyes be a ‘subjective’ road block on the development of a ‘critical, disinterested’ and ultimately ‘objective’ historiography. One can only repeat the earlier theoretical point that partisanship is inherently bound up with objectivity.